“MAYDAY! MAYDAY! MAYDAY!”

  Meadow Hayashi: “Nya, are we getting out of here alive?”

  Nya Griffin: “Meadow, I will get you home in one piece. Trust me.”

  The APS readout in Nya’s cockpit held steady at 26. She wrestled the medevac craft through the air, juking and rolling as two Imperial fighters hounded her from behind. The right wing was already trailing fire. After one last barrel roll to dodge an incoming missile, the airframe finally lost stability and began to nose-dive.

  Nya gripped the stick with one hand, the other dancing furiously across the projected controls.

  Hold it together. I have to stay alive.

  At 150 meters above the ground, the nose jerked up—just enough. Then the medevac shuttle slammed into the earth.

  Nya saw Meadow’s body whip from side to side against the crash harness. Her head struck the bulkhead; her eyes fluttered once and then shut.

  “Meadow…”

  A thunderclap of impact.

  Blackness swallowed Nya’s vision.

  That was the last thing she remembered.

  When she woke again, she and Meadow were locked in a dark room. Every day, someone shoved in a tray of sludge—thick and lumpy like watered-down mud.

  “Name?”

  Nya stayed silent.

  The Imperial female officer studying her let the corner of her mouth curl upward.

  “Good.”

  After that, Nya and Meadow were transferred to an even smaller, lower room. No light at all came through, except a sliver from the hatch where food was passed in.

  One week later

  The stench in the room was overwhelming.

  The same female officer stepped in.

  “Name?”

  Meadow’s lips parted slightly, then closed again. Her hair hung in dull, tangled clumps. Her face was pale, her body trembling.

  The officer clapped her hands once, then leaned down to whisper in Meadow’s ear:

  “I love your type. It means there’s so much more fun for me to uncover.”

  She picked up a water hose and sprayed Meadow. The medic’s slender body shook like a willow branch in a storm.

  A thin blue arc crackled—pop, pop.

  “Orders from above: no visible marks during interrogation,” the officer said lightly. “But that just means I have to get creative, doesn’t it?”

  The electric arc slid across the film of water on the floor.

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

  A scream ripped through the cell—high, raw, and animal.

  Two weeks later

  Nya and Meadow lay on the floor like discarded rag dolls, empty of life.

  Death, by then, felt like nothing but release.

  “Nya… do you regret flying me to the front?”

  “Don’t be stupid. If I had to choose again, I’d still take you. Even without Nightshade, I’d take you. You’re my family. My sister.”

  In Nya’s mind, razor-thin wings flashed past, carving open an endless sky.

  Three weeks later

  A tall Imperial officer walked into the interrogation chamber and found two women who barely qualified as alive. He glanced sideways at the female officer beside him.

  “The Emperor is currently broadcasting his… ‘benevolence.’ I expect not to see this again.”

  “Y-yes, sir,” the woman stammered.

  “I’ll be transferring them to a different holding site. Here are the orders.”

  He handed over his tablet, then turned and walked out through the door.

  Now — four days after the end of Chapter 2

  Jack had been running south for four days. He was holed up in a reeking mud pit, living off energy bars scavenged from the battlefield.

  Submerged in the cold, fetid slurry, he was more ghost than man. Above his head, the forest floor shuddered under the pounding treads of Imperial mechs. Transport engines growled overhead while the men who wanted him dead barked orders in their harsh, guttural dialect.

  This was Jack Harlan’s new reality: a corpse buried in mud, waiting for the footsteps overhead to roll on by.

  He’d learned to control his breathing, to minimize every movement—Sergeant Brock’s favorite nightmare of a lesson.

  “Play dead. Just don’t actually die.”

  Now, that little trick was the only thing keeping his fat ass from being flattened into paste.

  Fuck.

  Every muscle in his body was coiled tight. For days he’d been operating on pure survival instinct. Along the way, he’d scavenged mech parts and set up a few crude traps around the mud pit—tripwires and warning rigs built from junked components. If a Vector or an Imperial patrol got too close, at least he’d have a few seconds’ warning to bolt.

  It was a solid plan. It was plans like this that had kept him alive through thirteen flaming disasters of battles.

  First, he heard the hum of a hover troop carrier. Then boots scraping over soil. A man’s rough voice, speaking in that gravelly Imperial accent.

  Jack eased his head up and squinted. He saw a tall Imperial officer in a pristine uniform jump down from the vehicle, holding a portable scanner in one hand, like he was hunting for some kind of signal jammer.

  Two bound figures sat inside the carrier.

  The officer strode toward the discarded mech parts—right where Jack’s trap trigger lay hidden. He bent down to inspect them.

  Jack froze for a heartbeat. He hadn’t really expected anyone to walk right into it.

  STARK-2 spoke in his ear, tone flat and cold:

  “Target has entered trap sector B-7.”

  Now.

  CRACK.

  The sound of bone shattering.

  A massive hydraulic shaft snapped upward, coiling around the officer’s torso like a steel python. The stored kinetic energy crushed his powered exoskeleton and ribcage in the same instant, turning his chest into a compacted mess of armor and bone.

  He dropped like a puppet with its strings cut, twitched twice, and went still.

  Jack crawled out of the mud.

  He was coated in black, stinking muck, the smell of rot clinging to him like a second skin.

  Panting, he stomped over to the corpse and stripped off the man’s tac vest, comm unit, and power cells with rough, practiced movements.

  Only then did he turn toward the carrier and really look at the two women inside.

  One wore a pilot’s uniform. Her face was streaked with dried tears, but her jaw was clenched with stubborn defiance. The other wore a medic’s kit—slightly younger, hair a tangled mess, eyes filled with a terror that had long since gone beyond the immediate violence in front of her.

  Jack could see it. This wasn’t just the look of prisoners. Not just beaten soldiers. This was what you got when something much darker had already done its work.

  The two Federal women stared back at him, their minds scrambling to process what they’d just witnessed—a monster hauling itself out of a swamp, killing their captor with silent, brutal efficiency.

  Jack nudged the crushed officer’s body with his boot, kicking it into the pit. Then he glanced back at the two women still frozen in place.

  “Move it. What are you waiting for?”

  The women looked at each other. In that shared glance, something like hope flickered—small, fragile, but real.

  They struggled to their feet and stumbled after the fat, reeking, and inexplicably reliable figure walking away from the carrier.

  Reflection

  Heroes march to their deaths because they believe they must. Cowards cling to life because they believe they absolutely must not die.

  And sometimes, cowardice is the cruelest—and strongest—force of all.

  Because history isn’t written by the brave.

  It’s written by the ones who survive.

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